Dell CFO Comments on Going Private, 3PAR Loss, and More

Much of the glory of Dell from a decade ago has been stripped off as it faced much of the tech world’s adversities, from losing acquisitions to stocks declines.

CNNMoney.com had an interview with CFO Brian Gladden of Dell, giving us an overview of how the company is going to position itself in the constant shift of consumerism of things digital, and what sorts of challenge the PC giant is currently looking into.

Dell’s approach on its lose out to Hewlett-Packard in the 3PAR bidding war is more on the bright side.

“3Par is a great asset with a new approach to storage. But there are clearly other options and still some interesting assets out there. For instance, we just acquired Boomi, which is a software as a service company.”

HP just needs 3PAR more, and if Dell happened to have acquired 3PAR, that would mean a major blow on HP. Not only do they lost an asset that is extremely important in scaling their existing service, it would also mean an additional player in the competition, and HP can’t let that happen.

When asked about how the company is going to position itself in the hardware and PC refresh for businesses booming industry, Brian explains:

“Dell is a company in transformation. We’re investing more in enterprise business solutions, which is now a $17 billion business for us. The explosive growth in online video, virtualization and the move to the cloud is driving a huge need for storage capacity. Our server sales are up, and the bulk of our acquisitions will be in those areas.”

“At the same time, we have a large PC business, which is still where 50% of our revenue comes from. About 80% of that is business customers. So we’re well positioned to take advantage of that refresh.”

However, a key point in the interview is regarding the CFO’s position on the rumor that Michael Dell is taking the company back to private:

“We spend a whole lot of time thinking about this. There are many options for us, and we have lots of cash on hand. We talk about everything from keeping everything the same, to doing a bigger and broader buy back while still keeping the company public, all the way to doing a leveraged buyout and taking the company private with [CEO] Michael [Dell] as the primary shareholder.”

Brian also expressed that if they are doing their best to let the company stay as it is. Of course, rival HP is facing some indirect problems with Oracle suing their CEO’s former employer, SAP.